dug 
Hey it’s a new year. Guessing new things will happen:-)
Was writing a little piece about the history of the DVD format with a focus on the impact of lawyers and copyright defenders on the quality of the customer experience…
Turns out that in 2026, a person can head on over to HMV and put £10 down and walk away with a DVD of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning. They can bring that home and watch it on their fancy large OLED flatscreen TV.
But that recording they’ve just paid for is compressed using MPEG-2. This is a mandated quality format that was agreed in time for the first release of movies on the format in Japan in 1996. So as of this year, MPEG-2 has been compressing movies for 30 years.
Kinda makes you wonder what they mean when they say “DVD quality”…